As the world faces the oncoming reality of declining energy,
fraying infrastructure, and other consequences promised to us by the profligacy of the fossil fuel
age, we’re left to look into a future that at first appears a trackless wilderness. The
monocrop of globalized industrial civilization has handed down precious few frameworks that we can
use to understand what it will be like to live in an age of less. It has dealt with its
impending dissolution by closing its eyes and pretending it’ll never happen.
And yet if we’re to survive and even thrive in the future, we must have stories.
For narrative is how we make sense of our world. The high-glitz fantasies we’re offered these days
won’t be much ultimate help, though: visions of spacefaring utopias or serves-us-right armageddons
are diverting and perhaps cathartic, but bear little resemblance to the futures we’re actually
likely to get.
New Maps is a quarterly journal of short stories that take place
in the Earth’s realistic future. Not a paradisiac or apocalyptic end of days, nor an
easy continuation of the last few decades’ business-as-usual with somewhat different fashions, but an
era in which our ecological and energy bills have come due, and we and our descendants have
proceeded to do what people always do: figure out creative ways to keep doing all those things that
make up life, the loving and hating and laughing and crying and all the rest, in the times we’ve
been given.
This is fiction of real life in an age of limits—an age that, like every
other, will mix the tragic and the comic and the who-knows-what-just-happened, and leave it to us to
make sense of it all. This is fiction full of cobbled-together and home-brewed technology,
reinvented culture with sacred cows butchered and new ones bred, and mourning and celebration of
the old world’s end mixed with hope for renewed health and integrity within a homespun patchwork of
new ways of life.
New Maps readers,
No snowshoeing to get this one to the post office, at least: the snow has
receded, if only about a week ago. U.S. subscribers will be getting their
copies of the spring New Maps within the next few days, and international
subscribers a little bit later. If you aren’t subscribed, you can order your
copy of the issue at our Order page.
Read more…
New Maps readers,
A quick announcement for you. As I alluded to in the beginning of the spring issue, a new project is coming from Looseleaf Publishing. This spring I’ll be working with John Michael Greer and eleven great authors to publish the winners of Greer’s Gristle writing contest.
Read more…
New Maps readers,
In the midst of the biggest blizzard of the season up here in northern
Wisconsin, today I was happy to snowshoe out over a couple feet of snow to get
the Winter 2022 issue of New Maps
off to the post office. If you've renewed or subscribed for 2022, your copy
should arrive within about a week (in the U.S.; some overseas copies have
arrived already).
Read more…